Literary star, out of the limelight (Paul Brownfield, Los Angeles Times)

TL;DR (plain-language summary)

An April 2003 Los Angeles Times profile of David Foster Wallace in his first year teaching at Pomona College (a reluctant, hard-won interview conducted over dinner in Claremont). It is a post-Infinite Jest profile — Wallace is finishing the set-theory book Everything and More — valuable chiefly as biography: the teaching life, the flight from literary celebrity, and his conflicted read of the Franzen/Oprah episode. Its one interpretive contribution is Wallace's blunt acknowledgment that a literary novel — even one attacking commodity culture — is itself a product: to keep such fiction alive, "you have to murder it to save it", and "Even a book that's about living in a culture that relentlessly turns everything into a product is a product." That self-aware complicity bears on whether Infinite Jest escapes or performs the logic it diagnoses. Not in Burn's anthology.

Key claims

• Wallace is in his first year as the endowed Roy Edward Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College, tenured, teaching one course a semester; he is finishing "a nonfiction book on the inventor of set theory" (Everything and More, on Cantor). [L152-174]
• He guards his privacy fiercely — no faculty photo, no television — and works "poised, ready to write, 10 hours a day." [L102-172]
• On Franzen and Oprah: Wallace calls Jonathan Franzen "one of my few writer friends" and voices "admiration mixed with a mild contempt for the increasingly savvy way" Franzen handled the book-club controversy; the whole affair makes "the head just goes around and around and around." [L193-210]
• On the literary book as commodity (the crux-bearing remark): "There's a weird illogic about it, because the less important literary fiction gets to the culture," the harder publishers must market it — "So in order to keep it alive, you have to murder it to save it." [L213-215]
• As a teacher he is "cool but rigorous": students face "a small paper on each book, a 10-page midterm and a 20-page final", and he calls himself "a fascist opponent" to the flabby creative-writing pedagogy that treats the work as merely expressive. [L240-244]
• He read the entire Tom Clancy oeuvre on airplanes — "for a long time there was no better airplane reading than Tom Clancy." [L144-146]

Theories & evidence

THEORY: A literary novel — even Infinite Jest, which attacks commodity culture — is inescapably a product itself, so the book is complicit in the logic it diagnoses

• Crux: book-as-entertainment
• Stance: complicates
• Evidence:
  • [author] "A book is also a product. At least the books that we're talking about" [L217].
  • [author] "Even a book that's about living in a culture that relentlessly turns everything into a product is a product." [L218-219]
  • [author] the marketing paradox: "the less important literary fiction gets to the culture," the harder it must be sold — "you have to murder it to save it." [L213-215]
• Notes: This is Wallace granting the samizdat-complicity side of the book-as-entertainment question in his own words — the novel cannot stand outside the product-culture it critiques. It complicates rather than settles the crux: he affirms the book's commodity status without conceding it performs the Entertainment's fatal logic (he offers this about literary fiction in general, prompted by the Franzen affair, not about whether Infinite Jest is the samizdat). In the same passage he frames the ironies as banal — "There are not very complicated ironies built into that situation" — refusing to melodramatize the complicity. He also flags the remark as almost too obvious to print ("Shall I say something so obvious that you just won't even put it in the article?").

Themes

Entertainment / commodification (the literary book as product; marketing as the thing that "murders" fiction to save it); fame and privacy (the flight from celebrity, the no-photo/no-TV life, the Franzen/Oprah ambivalence); teaching and craft (the "fascist opponent" to soft creative-writing pedagogy; the rigorous seminar); biography (the Pomona professorship; Everything and More in progress).

Cross-references

• oregon-voice-1998 — the recoil from literary fame five years earlier ("weatherman"-scale attention); this profile shows the same temperament settled into the Pomona hideout.
• wiley-minnesota-daily-1997 — Wiley's art-vs-commercial-pleasure material is the earlier form of the book-as-product argument Wallace makes here.
• The book-as-entertainment / samizdat question (whether Infinite Jest performs or resists the Entertainment's logic) — Wallace's insistence that even a book attacking product-culture is itself a product is an author-side datum for the complicit-object reading.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the archived profile. Locators are 1-indexed line numbers in latimes-out-of-limelight-2003.txt.

• "So in order to keep it alive, you have to murder it to save it." [L215]
• "Even a book that's about living in a culture that relentlessly turns everything into a product is a product." [L218-219]
• "There's a weird illogic about it, because the less important literary fiction gets to the culture" [L213-214].
• "the head just goes around and around and around." [L210]
• "finishing a nonfiction book on the inventor of set theory" [L173-174]
• "I'm poised, ready to write, 10 hours a day." [L168-169]
• "I'm sort of a fascist opponent to that pedagogy" [L244]
• "for a long time there was no better airplane reading than Tom Clancy" [L145-146]
• "OK, what to tell you that's true and halfway interesting," [L127]
• "Pleasure doing business with you," [L266-267]